Researching Muslim Societies

Researching Muslim Societies Inside and Outside ZMO Researching Muslim Societies Inside and Outside ZMO Preface Ulrike Freitag ZMO Research Projects BMBF Programme 008–03 Aims and Results 8 Actors in Translocal Spaces Heike Liebau 13 Microcosms and Practices of the Local Katharina Lange 18 Concepts of World and Order Katrin Bromber Associated Research Projects 23 Transforming Memories: Cultural Production and Personal/Public Memory in Lebanon and Morocco Sonja Hegasy, Laura Menin, Norman Saadi Nikro, Makram Rabah 27 Urban Violence in the Middle East: From Empire to Nation State Claudia Schröder 3 Habitats and Habitus: Politics and Aesthetics of Religious World Making Murtala Ibrahim, Birgit Meyer, Hanna Nieber Essays by ZMO Fellows 35 Kashmir: Perceptions of Conflict from the Border Antía Mato Bouzas 44 The Arab Autumn? Samuli Schielke 53 Hybrid Mosques: Mixing Islam and “Chineseness” in Malaysia and Indonesia Wai Weng Hew 58 Grogneurs: New Media Actors in Benin (West Africa) Tilo Grätz ZMO at Work Conferences and Workshops 67 In Search of the Kingdom – Emerging Scholarship on Saudi Arabia. From the First Saudi State to the Present Nora Derbal 69 Big Dams: Investigating their Temporal and Spatial Politics in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Jeanne Féaux de la Croix 7 Beirut and Rabat: Reflections at the Margins of Two Workshops Laura Menin 78 Rethinking Memory Studies Yasser Mehanna Lecture Series 84 Speaking, Listening, Reading, Seeing: Ways of Shaping the World through Media Kai Kresse 85 The Impossible Aesthetic: Situating Research in Arts and Social Sciences/Humanities Regina Sarreiter 86 Islam and Society in Central Asia Sophie Roche, Dina Wilkowsky Inside ZMO Featured (Guest) Scholars 89 “I am still Transitioning!” Interview with Abdoulaye Sounaye 9 Difficult Heritage: Transforming Moroccan Secret Prisons Susan Slyomovics 94 A Visiting Research Fellow at ZMO Sami Hermez 95 Between Gathering and Scattering: Interdisciplinary Exchange at ZMO Norman Saadi Nikro ZMO Outreach Cultural Events 00 Upheaval and Diversity – Moroccan Film Days Sonja Hegasy, Regina Sarreiter 04 What We See. Images, Voices, Representation Regina Sarreiter 06 Leg over Leg Sonja Hegasy, Bärbel Möllmann 09 Table of Figures Imprint 3 ↓ ZMO Berlin, main entrance and courtyard (© ZMO) 4 Preface Ulrike Freitag The work of a research centre dealing with Muslim-majority societies in Asia and Africa offers many exciting moments, from the actual research itself to the exchange with colleagues at the centre and beyond. While much of the results are documented in academic publications, we want to share some of this excitement through this publication. It also offers an opportunity to reflect on the first six years of our main research programme Muslim Worlds – World of Islam?, which is generously funded by the state of Berlin and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and to think about some of the associated research projects as well. For those readers who do not know us: ZMO was founded in 996 as one of six independent, non-profit research centres. It is devoted to the interdisciplinary and comparative study of the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and South and Southeast Asia from a historical perspective, fo- cussing on connections between these different regions, as well as on their contacts with Europe. The cooperation of historians, anthropologists, economists, psychologists and experts from other areas transcends the standard disciplinary and regional fields of knowledge. Scholars at the Centre, who work in small groups, usually combine intensive archival work and field research and value intense cooperation with partners in the regions where they work. While basic research remains at the centre of our activities, ZMO intervenes in public debates where our specific areas of knowledge seem relevant. The Centre cultivates a cooperative atmosphere and prides itself on welcoming many short- and long-term visitors from different backgrounds. 5 6 ZMO Research Projects BMBF Programme 008 –03 Aims and Results The central research programme Muslim Worlds – World of Islam? (008 –03) aimed to investi- gate a broad spectrum of historical and contemporary dynamics within and between the mostly Muslim societies since the eighteenth century, and their links with Europe. The research programme examined the unity or heterogeneity of the conceptions of the world in those societies of the Global South influenced by Islam and the relationship of these conceptions to concrete spaces and orientations of action and to competing visions of the world. The research programme assumed that cognitive and normative conceptions stand in tension with concrete action; this is not to be understood as difference but – since the cultural turn in the social sciences at the latest – also as a multi-faceted mutual influence. The relationship between religion, in particular Islam, and society in the context of globalization offered an especially striking and significant field of investigation to this end. Here, as elsewhere, linear processes could not be assumed. Rather, globalizing processes had to be considered in their upheavals, crises, and (in part violent) conflicts – which in turn also fuel this globalization. The research programme comprised three interdisciplinary project groups – Actors in Translocal Spaces, Microcosms and Practices of the Local, and Concepts of the World and Order – working on different historical and cultural aspects of the “Modern Orient” since the 8th century. These projects explored the translocal movements of people, goods, symbols and ideas between the areas of the non-Western world and to Europe. Each of these fields touches upon interactions between conceptions, practices, and crises of the global, but with different emphases and from different perspectives. Beyond that several cooperative projects exist with other institutions and the ZMO hosts a num- ber of researchers from different international research programmes. ← Chinese calligraphy meets Islamic geometry in the Beijing Mosque, Kelantan, December 0 (© Wai Weng Hew) 7 Actors in Translocal Spaces Heike Liebau Actor-centred approaches played an important role in earlier research projects at ZMO; they were carried out within the research line Akteure des Wandels (actors of change) between 996 and 000. At that time, the focus of research was on individuals and groups in Asia and Africa that, under conditions of colonialism, acted as intermediaries between cultures and were actively or reactively involved in both global processes and local projects. Taking the intermediary character of the actors as the starting point, the main question then was whether and how the actors created a “third space”, or an “in-between space”, and whether and how something “new” was de- veloped within that space. Shifting the focus from “actors of change” to “actors in translocal spaces”, the new research group took a different stance. The mobility of social actors operating translocally lay at the forefront of the projects that made up the ZMO-research group Actors in Translocal Spaces (008 –03). The actors examined here were traders, soldiers, workers, entre- preneurs, Islamic religious scholars (ulama) and intellectuals, but also “citizens of the web” (“netizens”). The geographical starting point for their activities was the global South. The actors operated in overlapping fields of tension, ranging from individual and collective strategies to translocal and global developments. Their operating spaces are affected by struggles for power related to colonial, cultural, political or economic dominance. How they define their goals and strategies in these conflictual translocal relationships, and what sort of practices of the global networks and translocal activities they use, was explored. One of our decisive conceptual starting points was the question of mobility as practice. The social actors we considered negoti- ate geographical, political, linguistic and often cultural and social boundaries, creating new translocal spaces of practice, practical blueprints and strategies in the process. The geographical crossing of boundaries by these actors is habitually accompanied by social and political mobility and can either hin- der social change or become symbolic of their particularly pre- carious situation. Such asymmetries and fissures in the margin- alization of actors were examined in the various projects. Of particular interest were actors in migration, diaspora or exile. The research group took a closer look at the key concepts of mobility, agency and knowledge, trying to define their roles in conceptualizing “actors in translocal spaces”. ↑ Book cover Heike Liebau, Cultural Encounters in India, 03 (© Social Science Press) Petra Heidrich and Heike Liebau (00). Akteure des Wandels: Lebensläufe und Gruppenbilder an Schnittstellen von Kulturen. Berlin: Das Arabische Buch. 8 We defined “translocal spaces” as social environments shaped by processes in which people, things and ideas move, meet each other and interact with each other. Regardless of whether one understands these spaces predominantly geographically (reordering regions as a result of geo- political changes, as is the case in contemporary Central Asia), politically (international/translocal/global movements, organizations), socially (migration, diaspora situations) or virtually (social spaces created by new communication technologies, internet/chat rooms), these spaces mark the framework conditions for the actors who live, move and act within

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